


Exalted Blood; Holy Pain

by Khadgarfield



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Age Difference, Anal Sex, Angst, Blood, Bondage, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dom Drop, Edgeplay, Hands Free Orgasm, Healing Magic, Impact Play, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, M/M, Platonic Sex, Possibly Unrequited Love, Religious Themes, Risk Aware Consensual Kink, S/M, Service Top, Shadowpriest!Anduin, Subspace, Whipping, sadism and masochism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:21:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26730565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khadgarfield/pseuds/Khadgarfield
Summary: A small heirophany in the dead of night. Faithful service, at a price.
Relationships: Genn Greymane/Anduin Wrynn
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19





	Exalted Blood; Holy Pain

**Author's Note:**

> To experience the Holy, that which is defined by being 'Mysterium' or ‘wholly other’, is to experience that which is simultaneously 'tremendum' and 'fascinans'(1). It is to experience a sense of unimaginable terror and powerlessness, while also experiencing a sense of wonder and inescapable allure – two opposite states of being that pull the self into manifesting a heirophany – an experience of encountering the divine. 
> 
> 1\. See Otto, Rudolf (1923). _The Idea of the Holy._ Oxford University Press.

Outside the keep, snow is falling. It is the first snow of winter, arriving earlier than usual, and it drifts like fragments of scattered ghosts from a moonless, overcast sky. Inside the walls of Stormwind Keep, the public rooms and halls and gardens are completely deserted. To an outsider, the place may have looked like it was in hibernation, but deep inside the very heart of the building, there is a chamber. Occupied. In the grate, a fire is burning, and it bathes everything around it in a warm orange glow. It’s hypnotic cracking merges with ragged breathing, before being absorbed into the static noise Genn can hear when he closes his eyes.

“Three,” He counts aloud, steadying himself as best he can and preparing for the next strike. The body beneath him, bare from the waist up and bound to the headboard, trembles in agonised anticipation. The meat of his back is already inflamed, struck with lines like gouges on the earth. Genn had never hit him this hard before. He had never been asked to use a weapon like this. Usually, he did it with a riding crop or a short lash, and as loathe as these options were, he still misses them. The scourge he is holding now feels too heavy. Brutal. It will draw blood soon – he is surprised it hasn’t done so already. Perhaps it will on the next strike.

 _A scourge._ He hears a distant voice in his mind, as if he is hearing himself speak from somewhere far, far away. _How ironic._

Genn swallows the lump in his throat. In a sharp, fluid motion, he brings the thing down to cut across the flesh of Anduin’s back. It splits skin with a dull crack, and the young man shudders. A loud cry pulls from his lips and hangs in the air, crystalline. It echoes in the marrow of his bones.

“F-Four.”

His voice falters. Beneath him, Anduin’s body is wracked with shivers, the triangle of muscles between his shoulder blades breaking into a glistening, feverish sweat. Genn’s heart is pounding so loud it fills all his head. His breathing is dizzying, quick and shallow. It’s as though he has been running for hours. Even though he feels no pain, he reacts as though he has struck himself every time he administers a lash. It’s enough to make his instinct roil, and keeping himself in human skin in this moment is one of the hardest things he has ever done. He has not always been a man with great self-control, but he has never had to exercise discipline with himself in the way he does now.

Anduin moans. It is a hot, hungry sound, profoundly illicit - He has to resist the urge to respond in kind. Despite the allure of it, though, Genn hopes with all he is that this is the moment he will hear him say no. Utter the words that would indicate he wants mercy. 

He doesn’t.

Two more.

Genn has seen many horrors in his life but nothing, nothing, quite so abhorrent as this. How did this happen to him? To Anduin? Mortification of the flesh, for what purpose? It was a far sight from a rough slap across the face. The whole experience, he knows, was just an accident, but still he berates himself for not seeing it coming the first time.

 _Strike me in anger, then, if you would scold me - Strike me as no one else would dare_.

Strike him? For his own satisfaction? When he did, it was only a moment of weakness. A lapse in judgement. Or perhaps it was really several weaknesses in quick succession, one after the other in a fatal spiral. They weren’t only his. Anduin, after all, had not resisted. The desperation in his grip, in his eyes, had said it all.

_I need it._

And then, after that, the next time too.

_I need it still. But more._

Genn doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand many things when it comes to the whims of the wilful young King. Anduin Wrynn is soft to the touch, with smooth skin and golden hair and a heart that yields far too easily. But Anduin Wrynn is also stubborn – he is righteous and fierce and persistent and strong. This is something anyone who knows him understands, even if no one ever says it out loud. In all his years on Azeroth, he has never met a man so unrelenting. So magnetic.

Magnets, notoriously, are just as apt to attract as repel.

He bears the penultimate strike with only a gasp, but the muscles in his arms tense as though he might try to yank them down into his chest, protectively. The rope restraining him pulls on the headboard, making it creak.

“Five,” Genn tells him, and his voice is louder this time, but only slightly more steady. Rivulets of blood are beginning to trickle over Anduin’s skin, towards the dip of his spine down the middle of his back. The way he is breathing makes Genn’s stomach twist like it is full of snakes. It makes his loins ache. He hates it, he hates it but oh, he finds himself wanting to hear it more.

_Dangerous._

It's like a compulsion. Like watching a slaughter. The sense of powerlessness is horrific, and he can’t pull his eyes away for even a second.

He tightens his grip on the handle of the weapon, and strikes him as hard as he can one last time. This strike carries the fear and the fury of decades inside it – the strength of a lifetime, forged in conflict and tempered by loss. It hits as though Genn is striking an enemy on the battlefield. Unlike an enemy, or perhaps exactly like one, Anduin cries out in ecstasy. Genn bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. This does seem like combat, in so many ways. It gives him the same terrible exhilaration. It gives him the same feverish sweat. The lust of it all is… palpable.

With a shaking hand, Genn lowers the weapon and slides off the king. Standing now, he is dizzy, and again he has to wrestle very hard not to shift from a man into a beast. It's like nausea, but sharper and more painful.

 _I’m not in danger,_ he tells himself, even though he is and his instinct, his biology, can tell. _I am not an animal. I am a man._

Too much of a man.

He forces himself not to think about how hard his dick is, refusing to let the shame of it set in until his job is done. He knows the routine. He has to stick by it. The response Anduin has got from him is a symptom of experience, not a reflection of who he is. He knows what comes next, and he knows he needs an erection for it. He can’t let himself entertain the idea that beating him is erotic. Narcotic.

_Addictive?_

Maybe.

Genn moves to release Anduin from his bonds. The young man is still lying there, still racked with trembles like he is going into shock. Genn has seen it many times, a circulatory response common among dying solders. Of course, the young king himself has witnessed it, reaching for these bodies with glowing hands. His skill is forcing the blessing of the light into them. Dragging them back from the brink of oblivion - from the brink of wherever it is Anduin is now. His face is turned to the side against the mattress, so Genn can see a sliver of his face. When he moves to the side table, to set the scourge down and get the oil from the drawer at the bottom, he sees that he single eye that watches him is glazed over, like his mind is still infinite eons away. This is a fearful thing, it usually only happens when Genn beats him particularly severely, but nonetheless it is also grimly reassuring.

It means that he is doing his job well. That he might not need to do this again for a while.

Genn makes a signal at Anduin with his left hand. It’s a symbol priests make at one another sometimes – A symbol they agreed he could use if he wanted to check in.

_Benediction? Or just an attempt to delay the inevitable?_

At first, the body on the bed does not respond. It’s obvious he can’t see Genn standing there at all. He is startled, then, when Anduin makes a sound, one that is weak, longing, and pleading for him to finish his job. The single eye he can see flutters closed, and weakly the young man’s body moves as though he wants to pull himself to kneel, but he lacks the vitality. Genn steels himself. He knows he has to keep going, but before he does, he needs to ground himself. He leans in close and presses his nose and forehead against the side of Anduin’s face. His heat and warmth is reassuring – he is alive, even if he is lost in orbit right now, flying far too close to the sun.

 _Don’t kiss him,_ he reminds himself, as the instinct to press lips against skin rises in him. _Don’t_.

He climbs back on the bed and begins to unlace the front of his trousers. There is a sense of relief that rolls over him when he releases his burgeoning length from its prison. The body beneath him is light and he has no trouble moving him. When he moves a pillow under Anduin’s hips to elevate them, he feels that he is not the only one hard and throbbing. This is as comforting as it is bonechilling. Blood is running freely now, over the sides of the smaller man’s ribs, and it leaves reddish brown spots on the linen below. 

As always, Anduin had prepared before Genn had gotten there, and that small gesture was a great mercy. On top of everything, doing that was far too much. Too much intimacy. Too distracting. Too likely to make him hesitate and ask himself questions.

_What the fuck am I doing here?_

_What the fuck does this mean?_

It means nothing besides the faithful service of an advisor to a king.

Anduin moans a low, primal moan as he enters him. It touches a place even deeper in Genn than the ghost of the wolf in his blood. It’s a sound that seems more ancient than curses – even more ancient than the most ancient thing. It’s the beginning and the end, a glimpse into infinity, and it is torturous and yet, compelling. A coil of pleasure tightens in his stomach at the sound, and momentarily lost in the desire to hear it again, he pulls back and slams himself back in. Forcibly.

It works.

The sounds Anduin makes when fucked are akin to the sounds he makes when beaten, but not quite as wrenching. They positively melt on the air between them, luscious with a forbidden, needy richness that makes Genn think he might succumb. Most times, when he does this, Anduin is coherent enough to beg him. To tell him to fuck him harder. Rougher. That he wanted him to cum. Genn has never let himself do that, though. Not yet, and not ever. They’d been doing this for months now and he still hasn’t, and he swears to himself with every thrust of his hips that he never will. He never will. All of these moments, and all of the things Anduin asked of him, would remain mere acts of service so long as he doesn’t do that.

But Anduin has never been this deep before. He has never been this fucked in the head. Troublingly, he has never been this… enticing. Genn groans lowly, body alight with pleasure, and with the hand not holding Anduin’s hips he reaches out to rake his nails

_Claws_

over the gashes in his back.

Anduin seems to snap out of his state of dissociation like a drowning man coming up to the surface of an endless lake. His body arches, and he cries out, his arms flailing to push himself upwards and then back, harder onto him. Genn pulls his hand back, terrified. The heat coming off him is immeasurable - His back is burning with white light, the slashes in his flesh knitting together and fusing like they are being cauterised before his eyes. Anduin is sobbing, his entire frame racked with it. Genn makes the mistake of faltering, and the young man’s body flares again with that searing white light. Genn feels himself being thrown backwards, hitting the mattress with a force that makes his heart stop beating for a moment, and he is being held down by a crushing weight, something that isn’t hands and isn’t anything but air, coagulated, morphing and shifting and undulating with shadow. He feels powerless. Fragile. Afraid. And exhilarated.

Anduin turns, pulling himself to kneel over him, and throws his golden hair back.

 _Even the Naruu can be corrupted._ Genn remembers. _He’s so bright, but there’s a void in his eyes._

Genn, splayed back on the mattress, one leg bent painfully under him, sucks a shallow breath into his chest. Anduin’s gaze is fixed on him, roiling with umbrage, crackling with desire. Genn can’t move – whether he is paralysed by fear, or by the force of an external mind, he can’t tell.

“ _Will you deny me?_ ” The king asks him, but his lips don’t move and he isn’t really asking he’s thinking it. Thinking it with the force of a malevolent storm. The light that envelops him is sublime. Unspeakable. Neither black nor white nor grey. Impossible to comprehend. Impossible to perceive.

_No._

His touch feels like it will leave carbon burn marks in its wake. Genn thinks His body is celestial, as it leaps on him, tumbling from the cosmos like a falling star. It moves with the gravity of a comet in the daylight, and bleeds shrapnel like hot tears onto earth. It collides with his own in a way that leaves him breathless. Ignited.

Anduin mounts him, grabs him desperately, and from one split second to the next the weight holding him cracks open and the pressure on his body is gone. He is lost in a vacuum. Empty space. He stops thinking as Anduin kisses him, consuming him with lips hot like fever, biting at him keenly like he wants to tear him apart.

Something terrible has happened here. Somewhere they have crossed a line. This is unforgiveable and he knows it in all of his meat and his blood, but he meets the kiss with unbridled ferocity anyway and Anduin seems to move with him like he is swallowing his soul.

He gives him what he wanted.

Anduin cries like a dying monster when Genn cums in him, a shudder of shadow magic, then white light, tearing through his frame. He’s guttering like a candle flame drowning in a pool of wax, and all Genn can do is watch as he throws his head back, blooming shadows billowing out of him, and he finishes too all over Genn’s stomach.

The sound of broken glass echoes in the aftermath. The window of the bedchamber has blown out, and a cold wind is breathing into the room. The fire is extinguished, and they are lost in darkness.

There’s only one word for the experience really.

Harrowing.

_Divine._

…

Genn sits on the bed dressed in clean clothes, propped up by pillows so the young king can rest his head on his lap while he is sleeping. His face is the perfect picture of innocence, that of a young man wrought of grace and virtue, and Genn is hollow inside as he watches him rest. In the wake of their contact, he is always exhausted. He has never asked Anduin to heal him in the aftermath, he has never borne injuries, or bruises, or blood. But always after he helped the younger man to bathe, always after he helped him to bed and gave him water and bread and a heavy blanket, he felt it settle on him. Guilt like an abscess deep inside his heart. Aching muscles. Sorrow.

Had he failed him?

_A father with one dead son, and a monster for the other. Am I truly irredeemable?_

He strokes his hand softly through silky hair, like straw. Anduin’s eyes flutter open and he stretches luxuriously.

“Feels nice,” He mumbles, lips curving into a sleepy smile.

“Don’t get used to it,” Genn tells him, feeling his guts jolt into his chest suddenly, with force.

He remembers the kiss. How it had felt in his mouth. The fire in him. The emptiness it left in his core is akin to longing.

_Don’t!_

Anduin, sensing his tension, moves a hand up from under the blankets and delivers a short pinch to his thigh. It hurts, but also serves to bring his attention back to the present. The moment in which he isn’t being kissed by a creature of light and shadow. A glorious, hideous, beautiful, terrible thing.

“Thank you Genn,” The king of the Alliance regards him with steady, clear blue eyes. Genn wonders, fleetingly, if he even remembers, or if for him it is all a forgotten dream. A blur. “As always, I am grateful for your service.”

Only service. Nothing more.

**Author's Note:**

> yikes.
> 
> lol sorry if there's any mistakes i reread this about 200 times yet still found myself defeated. UwU


End file.
